Stephen Cole Kleene
Stephen Cole Kleene ( ; or , Kleene himself pronounced it . His son, Ken Kleene, wrote: "As far as I am aware this pronunciation is incorrect in all known languages. I believe that this novel pronunciation was invented by my father." However, many instances of this surname can be found in the Netherlands and Dutch pronunciation of 'ee' is as ay as in hail, but shorter. Probably, Kleene was aware of that.}} January 5, 1909 – January 25, 1994) was an American
mathematician. One of the students of
Alonzo Church, Kleene, along with
Rózsa Péter,
Alan Turing,
Emil Post, and others, is best known as a founder of the branch of
mathematical logic known as
recursion theory, which subsequently helped to provide the foundations of
theoretical computer science. Kleene's work grounds the study of
computable functions. A number of mathematical concepts are named after him:
Kleene hierarchy,
Kleene algebra, the
Kleene star (Kleene closure),
Kleene's recursion theorem and the
Kleene fixed-point theorem. He also invented
regular expressions in 1951 to describe
McCulloch-Pitts neural networks, and made significant contributions to the foundations of mathematical
intuitionism.
Provided by Wikipedia
